Mayor of Toronto demands re-eligibility for coronavirus vaccine as ICU occupancy sets new record

Toronto Mayor John Tory said that as the number of patients in Ontario’s hospital ICU increased, the state restructured its COVID-19 vaccine priority list to focus on the most affected areas and essential workers. He states that he needs to stop judging eligibility down the age pyramid. New record.

Tory says the spread in areas where essential workers cannot stay home is unacceptable and the current regime of vaccine deployment has not reached them.

Tories said at CP24 on Sunday morning, “We need to bring vaccines to high-risk workplaces so we can take vaccines to buildings in high-risk areas and be proactive in arming those needles. Must be. “

The· Current vaccine priority phaseBeginning this month, the shots are primarily aimed at the general public over the age of 60, although they include mandatory supply chain workers and teachers who cannot work from home.

Some hospitals and vaccine clinics have begun to contact For people over 50 in TorontoAs long as it exists in a zip code identified as a hot zone of coronavirus infection.

The Tories said the current state’s vaccine reservation system is declining with increasing age, making it difficult to adjust for essential workers.

“At this time, the state registration system can only register based on age. Therefore, if you are 42 years old and working in a high-risk environment, you are under your current age and there is no way to register. I’m sorry. “

Dr. Colin Furness, an epidemiologist at the University of Toronto, said the system needed to be modified to get more endangered workers as soon as possible.

“If there are reports that we’re taking it in the freezer and the schedule isn’t met, it’s a very inefficient system here,” he told the CTV News Channel.

“We should line up essential workers, and we aren’t doing that.”

As of Sunday morning, Ontario is waiting for about 980,000 COVID-19 vaccine uses.

Meanwhile, Critical Care Services Ontario had 467 people in the Ontario hospital intensive care unit due to COVID-19 as of midnight Saturday, 47 more than the peak of the second wave of COVID-19 in January. Said.

Dr. Michael Warner of Michael Garron Hospital shared the story of one of the ICU patients, a woman in her 40s who became ill after being infected with COVID-19 at the factory where her husband worked.

“Her husband works in the factory where the COVID-19 outbreak occurred, but it wasn’t his shift, so he was told to go to work anyway,” Warner told CP24, and his family told him. He added that he gave permission to share her story.

“She started from a position where we could talk to her, then we had to intubate her, then we had to lie down on her, and she Was so ill that she had to be transferred to the Toronto General Hospital. “

He said it took three hours for 17 medical staff to connect her to an extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) machine. There are only a few dozen machines in the state, but not enough.

She died without being able to talk to her family.

“The closest thing they could say goodbye to her was watching her at a zoom meeting while she was paralyzed and sedated in the ICU,” Warner said.

He said her family agreed to share her story to make people understand that the third wave of the virus is another beast and that if they are defeated they will have to make a sacrifice. It was.

“People shouldn’t be in Yorkdale (Mall) because you’re behind the people who get to my ICU,” he said.

He urged the state to enact a stay-at-home order at GTHA, requiring rapid testing of all indoor workplaces with more than 10 employees.

He also said the state needs to vaccinate more factory and warehouse workers as soon as possible.

Dr. Andrew Boozary of UHN said the fact that the same situation of having low-income racialized workers bearing the brunt of the pandemic’s influence was observed in the third wave is unacceptable.

“Call policymakers and politicians to hear what they’ve done with these stories that have been repeated many times in the Brown and Black communities. I feel this isn’t enough. You don’t have to be a policy scholar to do that. “

At Scaborow, hospitals are currently out of surge capacity and are looking for ways to move patients out of GTA or treat them in “unconventional” spaces.

“Looking at these numbers, it feels like there’s something wrong with them,” said Dr. Lisa Salamon of the Scarbarrow Health Network, who said COVID-19’s total burden on the Ontario ICU.

She said the patients she saw entering her hospital were younger than the second wave and most were racialized.

At some point, hospitals in other parts of the state may not be able to relieve pressure from her hospital, Salomon said.

“We have already reached the surge capacity and are being asked to surge further. At some point, there will be no ICU to transfer to.”

Recent modeling has suggested the number of COVID-19 patients in the Ontario hospital ICU, even in better scenarios than the worst. It could reach 800 by the end of April.